Articles By Jim Roddy

The media panel discussion at VARTECH 2015 was a learning experience for the hundreds of channel executives in attendance. Following are three terms that played a role in our conversation that I wanted to share with you. It will behoove VARs to understand and master these.

Here are stories, quotes, and notes from the first full day of VARTECH 2015 — written from the docks at CocoCay, The Bahamas. The day was intriguing, interesting, and gratifying at different times. Here are some of the stories, quotes, and notes I jotted while traversing from deck-to-deck.

Most everyone in the channel is aware that when VARs complain about vendors, the topic mentioned most is the desire for greater margins. But do you know what I hear most often from vendors when they list the number one VAR area to improve? It’s marketing, hands down.

VARTECH 2015 featured a panel discussion on the topic of marketing your business. Panelists were Garrett Geib, president of the SkyRocket Group; Angela Diffly, the editor of VSR Magazine; Michael Carr, the vice president of sales at ProspectStream; and Jim Roddy, the president of Business Solutions. The panel was moderated by Rebecca Dauzy, VARCOM program coordinator at BlueStar. An edited transcript of the panel discussion follows.

When BlueStar and ScanSource, the two most powerful distributors in the point of sale and data collection space, commit significant resources to an initiative, everyone in the channel better pay attention or risk falling behind.

Change was not only in the air at RetailNOW 2015, it was on the agenda, the stage, the literature, the signage, and it boomed across the sound system in the general session and in seemingly every breakout room. One education session that laser-focused on this topic was “Creating The Right Business Model to Compete in Changing Times,” held Tuesday, Aug. 4.

It wasn’t too long ago that visiting a vendor booth at RetailNOW guaranteed hardware talk from wall-to-wall. That wasn’t the case in 2015, especially during my half hour at the Star Micronics booth Aug. 3. In addition to hardware, Star discussed new concepts including an app and a division focusing on cloud services.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Business Solutions channel content for this message: Resellers in the point of sale and data collection channel need to embrace managed services soon or their business will suffer, maybe even die in the next decade.